Dissertation

My dissertation, Emerging Solutions for Planetary Management: How Geoengineering Became a “Plan B” Response to Climate Change, blends science and technology studies and environmental communication theory. This project explores how geoengineering, specifically solar radiation management by sulfate aerosol injection (SAI), has evolved from a fringe idea to a seemingly serious option for responding to climate change. I examined the historical, social, cultural, political-economic, and legal factors that have served as conditions of possibility in this process. I employed post-structural discourse analysis to determine how climate engineering scientists and policy-makers legitimize continued climate engineering research generally, and SAI research in particular, as valid, necessary, and beneficial to society--as well as the global implications of these arguments.

This study’s findings contribute to science and environmental communication by demonstrating how science and policy circles conceptualize what counts as “good science” and how scientists articulate this in their own work. In order to maintain democratic ideals, more voices need to be included in decision making processes, and science must be critically evaluated as both research and a form of argument. This project serves to help clarify how processes of scientific debate influence broader circles (policy makers, invested parties, and the public) and demonstrates whdemocracy at large.

Current  Projects

• Actant articulation: This essay suggests the possibilities of pairing actor-network theory (ANT) and articulation theory together into a concept we call "actant articulation." In our synthesis, actant articulation incorporates the political force of articulation theory while still addressing the material relationships that shape our world in the structure of ANT. Meanwhile, pulling ANT into articulation addresses a necessary vocabulary for bringing articulation theory around the "material turn." As we argue, the various material parts and pieces that make up the world around us have a "voice." Actant articulation considers how the non-human shapes society through communication with humans, regardless of our ability to process it.

• Art & Ocean Plastics:  Environmental issues and connections between humans and nature can be communicated through art.  The study begins at the ocean plastics art exhibit at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, in Monterey, California, and focuses on how visitors interact with artwork specifically designed to impart messages of human impacts on the environment. We are examining how the individual artists explain their work in the themes of environmentalism and the relationships between science and art, studying the artists’ understanding, focus, and motivation for this type of communication. From there, we explore the reception and connection of audiences to the messages produced by the exhibit. We hypothesize that the artwork in the ocean plastics exhibit provides aquarium visitors with new perspectives on the detriment of ocean plastics, and offers audiences an opportunity to formulate new questions and interests about this issue. 

• Dow Chemical's "Seedlings in the Corporate Forest": There is an expansive body of literature exploring how gender-neutral formal structures benefit men over women workers, leading us to attempt to better engage with the way that informal bureaucracies, specifically those which are not gender-neutral, actively mobilize a pre-existing and expressly masculine occupational identity to create a secondary status for women workers. We begin by analyzing Dow Chemical's "Know More in '74" internal affirmative action campaign to explore how such structures, especially in industrial and academic science, resist femininity and gender-neutrality.

• Union Carbide’s “Hand in Things to Come”: In response to calls from rhetoricians of science to theorize the emergence and circulation of public vocabularies of chemistry, this study employs close-reading techniques to analyze illustrated, long-form Union Carbide advertisements published in popular magazines from 1950-1963. Interrogating how the campaign's appeals organized social narratives of science, the analysis demonstrates how the campaign fostered a strategy of chemical rhetoric that fused science with ideologies of religion and environmental domination through technical and synthetic means.